Re: cvs rdiff -B feature

[karl]

    Why isn't --brief (um, maybe only `-s' for rdiff) mode sufficient
    for this purpose?  

-s does not report date information, which is perhaps the most useful
information.  That's also why I went to the trouble of showing the
actual file removal date instead of having it always show `now'.

BTW, I also considered:
  cvs history (the history file is not reliable),
  diff (does not output date information),
  log (doesn't work on a base branch)
before I went to rdiff.  It's the only thing that suffices.

    And if the parser is your own tool, why not tell it to ignore the
    binary diff lines or run the file through sed and remove the lines
    before passing the data to your tool?

Two reasons:

1) Efficiency.  Diffs on binary files are generally *huge*.  It is
   noticeably slower (by far) to take the time to generate the diff in
   the first place and then throw it away in the second.
   
2) cvs rdiff fails on diffs on binary files, with this error:
cvs rdiff: failed to read diff file header /tmp/cvsBGaOWK for 
yellowdither_tile.gif,v: end of file


Thanks,
karl